Who Said This?

Something whispered something

that was not even a word.

It was more like a silence

that was understandable.

I was standing at the edge of the pond,

Nothing living, what we call living,

was in sight.

And yet, the voice entered me,

my body-life,

with so much happiness.

And there was nothing there

but the water, the sky, the grass.

~~ Mary Oliver ~~

The still voice that enters my body-life is a golden thread running through the stories on Gracious Unfurlings, particulary in the context of *interbeing. The voice is only heard in silent spaces.

Such a space is a Pacific coast estuary, where the songlines of elemental energies move to ancient rhythms of ocean tides and river flows. It’s a place to hear ancient whisperings. Built on several thousand years of accumulated glacial silt, the banks of sedge grass provide the first nourishment for grizzly bears coming out of hibernation. Ocean salt waters mix with fresh river waters to feed uncountable plants and creatures, even sequestering large amounts of carbon in the process. It’s in the inner sanctum of this estuary, found deep within the river valley, that my imagination turns for answers about what is mine to do for the Earth.

How do we restor(y) the *eco-niche of humans in wider Nature? Clearly, things are going badly; the old materialist worldview of separation, extraction, monetizing and endless expansion is at its end. The worldview of separation has devastated human relationships between one another and within the *more-than-human world.

Thinking of the inner sanctum, I recall how reflections on the water’s surface can be so clear as to easily be mistaken for the physical landscape itself. The surface barely ripples. I take a photo.

Rotated on the vertical, the image is a totem that invites me into wondering what we’re actually seeing of ourselves.

Interbeing is the term coined by Master Thich Nhat Hanh referring to all things being intrinsically related to one another.

Wider Nature is a term I coined to stop using “nature” as reference to something “out there”. Wider Nature conveys the sense that all life is embedded in overlapping eco-systems of relationship, i.e. humans are a unique species sharing space with multitudes of unique species and life-giving elements in wider Nature – we are interrelated, not separate.

Eco-niche is a term used by depth psychologist Bill Plotkin to describe the unique place from which each of us enriches the relational net made up of and shared by all living things.

More-than-human world is a term coined by cultural ecologist David Abrams that conveys our larger world that includes the human realm as one element or subset of Earth community.